


Pest Control

by spinninginfinity



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-14
Updated: 2013-05-14
Packaged: 2017-12-11 21:39:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinninginfinity/pseuds/spinninginfinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donna deals with some interlopers.</p>
<p>
  <i>‘There’s a spider, basically. A big one.’</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pest Control

‘Donna!’

Donna stopped typing and looked over at Josh’s office door, wondering if she was imagining the frantic tone in his voice. ‘Don’t shout,’ she called, after a moment.

‘Get in here!’

Definitely frantic. She got up from her desk and pushed his door open. ‘What’s the—what are you doing?’

His chair was backed up into the corner of his office. He was hugging his knees to his chest, eyes riveted to a point down by the leg of his desk.

‘There’s a, um,’ he began, not looking up at her. ‘There’s a problem.’

She folded her arms. ‘What problem?’

‘Don’t laugh.’

‘Okay,’ she agreed, hoping it wouldn’t be too ridiculous.

‘It’s a problem with spiders.’ He cleared his throat. ‘There’s a spider, basically. A big one.’

She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath and plastering a neutral expression on her face. ‘And you want me to get rid of it?’

‘Yes, please.’

She sighed, grabbing an empty glass from next to his computer. ‘Sure. Where is it?’

He pointed and went back to hugging his knees. 

Donna peered at it. ‘That is not a big spider.’

‘It’s huge!’

‘It’s tiny!’

‘It was staring at me,’ he insisted.

She rolled her eyes, kneeling down, and really, how was this part of her job description?

‘Whoa, hey, what are you doing?’ Josh asked, frowning at the upside-down glass in her hand.

‘I’m getting rid of it like you asked.’ She put the glass on top of the spider; it scuttled about for a moment and then settled down.

‘Can’t you just… squash it with a book?’ To his credit, he looked as though he was thinking the better of the words even as he said them.

‘Josh!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s cruel!’

‘It’s in my office,’ he muttered.

‘So? It’s not its fault you’re a big baby.’ She grabbed some paper off his desk. ‘There’s no need to kill it.’

‘Fine.’ He watched her for a moment. ‘Wait, could you use a different piece of paper?’

She stood up, putting the paper back on his desk. ‘You realize you’re not going to get… I don’t know, spider cooties?’

‘Still. No, not that one, either.’

‘For god’s sake, Josh! Would you find me some paper I can use?’

‘You’re the one who wants to save the thing. Can’t you use paper from your desk? Okay, no,’ he added hastily at the look she gave him. ‘I’ll find you something, hang on.’ He reached across to sift around the papers littering his desk for a moment and then thrust one at her. ‘Here you go.’

‘This is a memo from the office of the House majority leader marked “Urgent”.’

‘I know. So you can probably throw that away once you’re done.’

Donna smiled, kneeling down again. ‘You’re an idiot.’ She slid the piece of paper under the glass and stood. ‘I hope you know this spider probably has a spider family and spider friends it will never see again.’

‘Tragic,’ Josh said. ‘Could you take it away now, please?’

***

Josh came flying out of his office, slamming the door behind him. Donna put her face in her hands. ‘You’re kidding me. Again?’

‘I thought you said you’d gotten rid of it!’

‘I did!’

‘I just saw it again! Right on my desk, like it belongs there.’

She went over and opened the door; Josh shuffled behind her and she twisted to look at him. ‘What am I, your human shield?’

‘Well… yeah.’ He pointed. ‘Right there, look.’

There was, she could see, another of the admittedly largish beetles she’d gotten rid of earlier crawling across his desk. ‘It must be a different one.’

‘It’s the same one!’ Josh insisted, peering over her shoulder. ‘I recognize that weird mark on its back.’

She snorted. ‘Like you stayed near it long enough to look at its markings.’

‘It’s the same one, okay, because the alternative is a beetle infestation and I’m not having that.’

‘I don’t think you get to decide that.’

He ignored her. ‘When you took it out before, did you take it far away?’

‘I put it out the window.’

‘You have to take it further than that! They have a homing beacon of like three-hundred yards!’

She turned, regarding him stonily. ‘Are you telling me I have to go all the way out of the building every time you freak out about a bug in your office?’

‘Preferably take it into another building. Lock it in the desk drawer of whichever Republican we dislike most right now.’

‘I worry that you’re being serious.’

‘Well, if you just killed them like I said, we wouldn’t have this issue.’

Sighing, she went to scoop the beetle into her hands; this had become routine enough that she no longer bothered with the glass and paper. ‘Yeah, you definitely identified the root cause of the problem.’

Josh stood well back as she came back out of the room. ‘Take it far away,’ he reminded her.

‘A _homing_ beacon?’ she called over her shoulder.

‘I read about it once,’ he told her. ‘And you should find out whether I have a beetle infestation!’

***

‘How’s whatshisname?’ Josh asked, as he and Donna walked back to the bullpen after a late meeting. ‘Jim?’

‘Tim,’ she corrected, ‘and I wouldn’t know. I ended it last week.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Josh said, with little conviction.

Donna shrugged. ‘He was a nice guy, but… you know.’

‘What?’

‘He didn’t have that… something.’

‘What’s the something?’ Josh wanted to know, voice rising a little in pitch.

She grinned, enjoying winding him up. ‘Are you asking me to school you in What Women Want, Josh? Because it might be too late for you.’

‘I know what women want,’ he said sulkily, and went into his office.

And yelped and came back out again, yanking the door closed.

‘There’s a bat in there,’ he responded to her questioning look, voice very high-pitched now.

She gaped at him. ‘Are you kidding?’

‘Why would I kid about that?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t know. You have an overactive imagination. Maybe it’s not a bat; maybe it’s—’

‘It’s a _bat_ , just flapping around in there! It nearly flew into my face! What if it’s one of those bloodsucking ones?’

‘I don’t think it is.’

He looked at her, face expectant.

‘What?’ she asked, already knowing.

‘Can you get rid of it?’

‘Oh, so it’s all right for me to have my blood sucked by a bat?’ she huffed.

‘I thought you said it wasn’t a bloodsucking one?’

‘I don’t think. I don’t know for sure.’

‘Well…’ He made a scooting motion toward the door. ‘You can go and check.’

Glaring at him, Donna stood. ‘I was about to go home, you know.’

‘You can go home after you’ve done this.’

‘This is absolutely not what women want,’ she informed him.

The upside of it being a bat, she realized once she was on the other side of the door, was that she didn’t need to look very hard for it. The thing was soaring around and around the room, and Josh was right: once or twice it did fly a little too close for comfort.

‘Okay,’ she said, in the most soothing tone she could muster. ‘Okay. Let’s just calm down, shall we? Let’s just…’ She cast her eye around the room for something she could use to catch it; the glass and paper method was going to be of little use here.

‘Did you get it yet?’ Josh called.

She turned back, pulling the door open slightly.

‘It’s a _bat_ , Josh!’ she hissed through the opening. ‘It’s an actual thing that it makes sense for you to freak out over! It’s going to take more than thirty seconds!’ She closed the door again before he could protest that his freak-outs always made sense.

The bat was, if possible, flapping even more frantically. ‘It’s okay,’ she said again. Catching sight of Josh’s jacket lying over his chair, she moved cautiously across the room and behind his desk, pushing the window open further before grabbing the jacket and holding it in front of her.

‘Just settle down,’ she muttered. ‘Just settle on something for a moment, come on.’

The bat did not listen.

‘I’m trying to _help_ you!’ she said crossly. ‘Okay.’ She edged out from behind the desk. ‘I’m going to do this thing, and then you can go back to your bat friends and we can all move on with our lives.’

She held the jacket higher, preparing to throw it over the bat. Could this kill it, she wondered? What if the jacket was too heavy? Could bats die of shock?

Thankfully, it chose to land while she was mulling over the possibility, flopping down on Josh’s chair. She eyed it speculatively for a moment.

And then, because it appeared to have exhausted itself, she scooped it quickly into her hands, throwing it out into the night before it could react.

‘I got it!’ she called.

Josh opened the door a crack. ‘Did it bite you?’

‘No. It was really pretty cute.’

‘Oh, god. I bet you named it and everything, didn’t you?’

She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘ _No_ , but now I’m going to call it “Josh”.

***

‘Josh?’

He jumped, turning to look as Donna came out of their bedroom and pulled the door closed. ‘I thought you went to sleep.’

She bit her lip. ‘Yeah, I was going to. But I need a favor first.’ Catching his smirk, she added, ‘Not the kind of favor you’re thinking.’

Josh set aside the memo he was reading and stood. ‘That’s a shame. What can I do for you?’

‘I need you to get rid of a moth.’

There was a silence. 

‘One of the little ugly butterflies?’ Josh asked, a smile spreading over his face.

She flushed. ‘Yeah.’

‘You’ve taken on giant spiders, flying rodents and one time a snake—’

‘That was a glass lizard; they’re different.’

He blinked at her, momentarily distracted. ‘It looked like a snake.’

‘Glass lizards have eyelids,’ Donna said, ‘and ear holes.’

‘Snakes don’t have ears? How do they—?’ He waved his hands, deciding it wasn’t the time for a discussion of snake anatomy. ‘Anyway, you’ll clear long, green, slithery things out of my hotel room, but you’re scared of moths?’

‘They just—they _flutter_ and they’re all—’ Donna broke off, visibly shuddering. ‘Can you please come and get rid of it?’

Sighing, Josh came to stand with her in the doorway. ‘Can I remind you that I’m hardly what you’d call skilled in this area?’

She draped her arms over his shoulders. ‘I believe in you.’

He raised his eyebrows at her, tugging her closer with his hands on her waist. ‘You should give me some kind of token for luck before I go into battle. I might not come out alive.’

‘You have no room to mock me.’

‘Oh, I know. I was being serious.’ He slid his thumbs beneath her camisole, stroking her skin. ‘So am I allowed to squash this one?’

She pulled a face. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘Donna! Come on! When you, the resident bug whisperer, can’t get rid of it, I think that calls for a magazine and a lot of force.’

She sighed. ‘As a final, _final_ resort, then.’ 

‘Fine,’ he said, making to open the door.

‘You promise? Only as a last resort?’

‘I do.’

It was a promise he considered breaking once he was inside. He spotted the moth settled on the wall above the nightstand and eyed the book Donna was currently reading, but then he thought of the serious expression on her face just now and picked up his empty water glass and some paper instead. 

‘Lucky for you Donna’s such a bleeding heart,’ he muttered to the moth. He placed the glass over it; the moth was startled into moving and he was able to slip the paper underneath easily.

‘I did it!’ he called, triumphant and a little surprised at himself. He carried the glass to the window, setting it down on the sill so he could open the window and set the moth free.

Donna opened the door. ‘You didn’t kill it?’

‘I let it out the window.’

She smiled, coming over to him and putting her arms around his neck. ‘My hero.’

‘I am,’ he agreed, kissing her briefly.

‘Mm, maybe you could do me another favor after all?’ she suggested.

‘Really, you’re turned on by my moth-disposal heroics?’

‘It was brave of you,’ she said, kissing him again. ‘Bravery is a very sexy trait.’

He nudged her toward their bed. ‘You should tell me more about that.’

***

Donna slammed the previous day’s copy of the _Post_ against the windowpane and pushed the heel of her hand down hard on the paper.

‘Well, that was brutal,’ Josh said, after a long silence.

She pulled the paper away, grimacing at the thoroughly squashed wasp stuck to the back of it. ‘This is the exception, okay? This is the one thing. Are you going to argue with me?’

Josh shook his head. ‘Definitely not.’

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Feedback is welcome and appreciated!


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